New Visions for Public Schools

About New Visions for Public Schools

Founded in 1989, New Visions for Public Schools is dedicated to improving the quality of education children receive in New York City’s public schools. Over the past 21 years, New Visions has:

Established 34 small, effective schools in New York City during the 1990s – long before the national small schools effort. This work is the genesis for the nearly 400 small schools created by New Visions and others that now dominate the New York City landscape.

Worked with more than 200 community partners to start 99 new small high schools, serving 37,000 New York City public school students, leading to national recognition as the only organization to effectively use the small schools strategy to improve student achievement. Several years after they opened, these small high schools continue to outperform the system. In 2009, New Visions-created schools had an average four-year graduation rate of more than 72%, ten percentage points higher than the citywide average, with much higher graduation rates for special education and English Language learners. They also had substantially lower drop out rates, successfully retaining students and enabling them to graduate in five years.

Implemented a unique principal certification program—the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM)—which has certified 175 new school leaders through the work of improving schools. This program model has been adopted by Boston and Oakland, CA. The same design has informed an Urban Teacher Residency program, now in its third year, with 51 graduates and 34 current residents, with a goal of 200 graduates in 5 years.

Serves as an organization that supports a network of 76 schools, with more than 40,000 students, at the request of the Chancellor and the Mayor, and selected by the schools themselves. New Visions serves a higher percentage of African American, Latino, low-income, English Language Learner and special education students than the rest of the city—and we do better. Our graduation rates outpace those of the city.

Provides an innovation lab within the New York City public school system. We pioneered new data tools, including an “on track to graduation” metric that is now being used in all New York City public high schools where it is having an impact on the education of more than 250,000 students. And our inquiry team process, first developed in our leadership certification work, is now being used by almost 7,500 teacher-lead inquiry teams created throughout the system.

The Next Five Years

To increase our impact on public education in New York City and across the nation, New Visions will build upon three key strategies — school creation, school support and human capital development. We expect to accomplish this goal by:

Establishing a self-sustaining network of 18 high-performing public charter high schools in high-need neighborhoods. Drawing upon the most effective practices from the 99 small secondary schools we created through the New Century High Schools Initiative, we have developed a school model that will drive students to success in college and careers through radically different learning opportunities and school services.

Institutionalizing our current services to New York City public schools. Our goal over the next five years is to help schools achieve graduation rates of 80% and double the number of students prepared to directly enroll in college level courses, as indicated by the number of students earning Regents and Advanced Regents diplomas. Deepening our relationship with schools will be critical to having an impact on large numbers of students at scale.

Expanding our school-based principal and teacher leadership certification programs. New Visions will develop strong public schools—both within our emerging charter school network and our district network—as “teaching hospital” schools, based on the medical residency model. Aspiring teachers and principals will serve as residents who “learn by doing” alongside master practitioners. Our certification programs will play a critical role in developing high quality educators and ensuring a career ladder that fosters growth.

Projects

Dashboard of administration tools
This project aims to create a dashboard for administrations in the public school system. The tools will range from teachers absence systems for providing feedback to teachers. This project will be written in Google AppSctipt and utilize Many different Google systems (Doc/Spread Sheet/Calendar/ect.).

Data Import Toolkit
Data Import Toolkit is a proposed system that pulls in data from multiple data sources and allows for educators to analyze tends in the data at a variety of levels.Proposed system can be widely useful to the education system in schools. It will automate education system and provides various functionality to educators , students and their parents.Detailed description can be find in main proposal.

Rosters and scheduling || Reservations || pushData
The project is to build an Google Apps Script as part Spreadsheets. The NY iSchool will upload their data to a Google Spreadsheet from which the script needs to get data and create:
1) A roster for every period every day.
2)Personal schedule for every student
3)Personal schedule for every professor
Extensive documentation would of course provide other interested parties to implement this solution.
Reservations
Reservations is a light app for automating the process of making reservations via the users website.
The app uses a GUI to get information about the visitor and saves the information to a spreadsheet.
pushData
pushData is a app that will mainly be used as a backbone for other apps or system. It has also some potential as a standalone application.
pushData allows for an easy way to map copy relationships between spreadsheets. It uses time triggers to push data between spreadsheets.
This version of pushData uses ScriptDb as a huge part of the process.

SIS Jailbreak
This project uses Google App Script and allow user to connect to database such as MySQL, MS SQL and Oracle database. User will be able to use the GUI and design simple SQL queries to allow retrieval data and export to other Google Spreadsheets.